Some of YouTube’s biggest — and most controversial — personalities are facing backlash for promoting a gambling website that promises users they’ll bring home some luxury loot. Mystery Brand is a sketchy new website that allows users to “unbox” digital boxes with the potential to win hundreds, even thousands of dollars worth of luxury goods. YouTubers Jake Paul and RiceGum have both posted videos of themselves winning hundreds of dollars of merchandise after depositing just a few dollars into their mystery box accounts (“How I won AirPods for $4” reads the title of RiceGum’s video). The content creators have allegedly been paid $100,000 to post these sponsored videos (the allegations coming from other YouTubers who turned down the shady endorsement deal). Luckily, PewDiePie and others are hard at work warning users of the scam.
Mystery Brand’s Watch box. You could win a Rolex!
When we saw the Mystery Brand story, we just had to see if they’re offering any watches in their boxes. And they are, as you can see here, and “open” for $299. It gives users the hope they might win an 18k gold Rolex Presidential Day-Date, or be left with just a digital Casio, worth only a few dollars.
What’s funny though is the image they use for the Rolex Day-Date is actually just the first result if you do a Google image search for “Rolex 40mm Presidential 18k yellow gold.” It’s actually an image for a listing on Chrono24, list price $47,000. Clearly a pretty lazy effort to scam some unwitting consumers out of a few hundred dollars. Mystery Brand is posting a picture and offering a potential prize that it does not even own.
The Verge has more, but we wanted to highlight just how ridiculous Mystery Brand is by highlighting that it’s blatantly lying to its users, dangling prizes in front of them that it does not even own. In the meantime, save that $299 for one of our favorite everyday watches (heck, it almost gets you a Seiko SARB).